Flavour Bastard, London W1: “There’s me thinking Sexy Fish was as bad as it got” says Marina O’Loughlin of the Guardian.

The name? Brace yourselves: it’s Flavour Bastard. Roll that around your tongue: flaaavour baaastaard. And there’s me thinking Sexy Fish was as bad as it got.

Here’s the “remove rules and traditions” (their words) bastardry in full flow: South Indian-style white lentil vada (“doughnuts”) with Spanish chorizo and Italian pecorino. Oh, the wackiness: fan me, for I fear an attack of the vapours. Is it an improvement on conventional medu vada? Stodgy and salty and sickly, it is not. Or this bobby dazzler: roast sweet potato (served cold), glooped with fennel-flavoured yoghurt, sunflower seeds, a lot of coriander and quantities of damp chillied popcorn – a kind of mutant chaat that’s saying nothing of any interest.

Claude Bosi at Bibendum is everything a great place should be, says Jay Rayner in the Observer

“There are not enough veal brains on British menus. I mourned the passing of Racine when that closed, because they did them so well in a caper-studded beurre noisette. Here, a lobe is lightly breadcrumbed and then sautéed to golden. It wobbles as if still entertaining the odd thought, but there is crunch. It is served with a glossy take on sauce gribiche, the mayonnaise element replaced by a shiny veal jus, like the varnish of a dining table you can see your face in. It contains the finest dice of egg and cornichons. It is a dish using an ingredient others would reject, raised to a certain majesty.

“The starters list is full of frog’s legs and sweetbreads and asparagus. A pretty crab dish brings a whipped layer of brown crab meat, topped by finely picked white crab, then a layer of gently understated elderflower jelly. What makes it sing is the temperature: just warm enough to allow the flavours their voice. Main courses include turbot and Dover sole, suckling pig and long-cooked goat. The latter is a take on surf and turf, the puck of sweet braised meat tumbling into its razor clams and a sauce made with sea vegetables. On the side is a bowl of Jersey Royals so tiny, they’re practically foetal.”

The Guardian’s Marina O’Loughlin has to restrain herself from licking the plate at Bar Douro, London

“I’m just off the plane from Lisbon when I find myself (with some difficulty: it’s hidden away in Bankside’s new Flat Iron Square complex) in Bar Douro. Portuguese is one of the most under-rated cuisines, dismissed by many as an endless array of stringy piri-piri chicken and salty, swampy stews reeking of too much coriander.

“Proper Portuguese restaurants over here are few and far between (at time of writing, the wretched Tripadvisor’s top 20 Portuguese restaurants in the capital features 11 branches of Nando’s). Fair to say, I’m not brimming with hope about Bar Douro. But – spoiler! – it’s a little star: excellent produce, beautifully cooked in an azulejos-tiled room with barstools-only dining around an open kitchen and served at curvaceous marble counters. There isn’t a duffer among our choices: not dense, homemade bread stuffed with pimento-rich chouriço; nor a muscular octopus tentacle, its suckers charred, its interior snowy, lolling on a bed of suave sweet potato purée; nor crisp croquetes of alheira, a pungent, fatty and garlicky pork-free smoked sausage of Jewish origin, blobbed with lemon-laced mayonnaise.”

The Observer’s Jay Rayner is at one of France’s most famous gastro palaces, Le Cinq at the Four Seasons Hotel George V in Paris, this week – and he’s not impressed.

“The cheapest of the starters is gratinated onions “in the Parisian style”. We’re told it has the flavour of French onion soup. It makes us yearn for a bowl of French onion soup. It is mostly black, like nightmares, and sticky, like the floor at a teenager’s party. There are textures of onions, but what sticks out are burnt tones, and spherified balls of onion purée that burst jarringly against the roof of the mouth. A dish of raw marinated scallops with sea urchin ice cream is a whack of iodine. It is the most innovative dish of the meal, though hardly revolutionary. Sea urchin ice cream turned up on Iron Chef America back in the 90s.

The Times’s Giles Coren reckons Margot in London’s Great Queen Street is a ready-made classic.

“Margot. A proper restaurant. Not many of these opening any more. You walk in off Great Queen Street (where I used to live back in the 1990s, when there weren’t any restaurants in London at all, not one) and immediately sigh, because you know you’ll be okay.

“My red mullet main was a cracker: three meaty wedges of warm, ruby-skinned fillet, fanned over a cool, creamy burrata sauce, speckled with green olive oil and black slashes of squid ink, plus half a very small gem lettuce, grilled. Perfect.

“Big, sweet scallops came barely touched on a searing pan for a golden edge to the pale pink flesh with young artichokes sliced fine and both braised and dry-fried. And there was a dish of tonnarelli, freshly made and cooked very firm, tossed with olive oil, garlic and chilli and then drenched with shavings of black truffle… Continue reading →